Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | FICTION HEN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent which she has matched up with skill, ambition, and a fierce imagination. The resulting novel, Ten Thousand Saints, is the best thing I've read in a long time."
--Ann Patchett, bestselling author of Bel Canto and State of Wonder
A sweeping, multigenerational drama, set against the backdrop of the raw, roaring New York City during the late 1980s, Ten Thousand Saints triumphantly heralds the arrival a remarkable new writer. Eleanor Henderson makes a truly stunning debut with a novel that is part coming of age, part coming to terms, immediately joining the ranks of The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud and Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude. Adoption, teen pregnancy, drugs, hardcore punk rock, the unbridled optimism and reckless stupidity of the young--and old--are all major elements in this heart-aching tale of the son of diehard hippies and his strange odyssey through the extremes of late 20th century youth culture.
Author Notes
Eleanor Henderson is an author who was born in Greece and raised in Florida. She later attended Middlebury College amd the University of Virginia, where she graduated with her MFA. She has written two novels: The Twelve-Mile Straight and Ten Thousand Saints. Her works have appeared in several publications including Ninth Letter, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. She is also the co-editor of Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Writers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (7)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Henderson debuts with a coming-of-age story set in the 1980s that departs from the genre's familiar tropes to find a panoramic view of how the imperfect escape from our parents' mistakes makes (equally imperfect) adults of us. Jude Keffy-Horn and Teddy McNicholas are drug-addled adolescents stuck in suburban Vermont and dreaming of an escape to New York City. But after Teddy dies of an overdose, Jude makes good on their dream and forms a de facto family with Teddy's straight-edge brother, Johnny; Jude's estranged pot-farmer father, Lester; and the troubled Eliza Urbanski, who may be carrying Teddy's child. What results is an odyssey encompassing the age of CBGB, Hare Krishnas, zines, and the emergence of AIDS. Henderson is careful, amid all this youthy nostalgia, not to sideline the adults, who look upon the changing fashions with varying levels of engagement. Still, the narrative occasionally teeters into a didactic, researched tone that may put off readers to whom the milieu isn't new-but the commitment to its characters and jettisoning of hayseed-in-the-city cliche distinguish a nervy voice adept at etching the outlines of a generation, its prejudices and pandemics, and the idols killed along the way. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Set at the end of the 1980s, Henderson's first novel limns the way a tragic loss brings three people together in unexpected ways. When 16-year-old Jude Keffy-Horn's best friend, Teddy, dies of a drug overdose after a night of heavy partying, Jude blames himself, not knowing that Eliza, the daughter of Jude's father's girlfriend, gave Teddy cocaine the evening of his death. Eliza also slept with Teddy, and she soon discovers she's pregnant with his child. Both Jude and Eliza find themselves drawn into the orbit of Teddy's magnetic older half-brother, Johnny, a punk-rock tattoo artist who ostensibly abstains from drugs, alcohol, and sex. But Johnny's clean living masks the secret he's trying to hide from the world, a secret that threatens to unravel Jude and Eliza's plans to leave childhood behind and jump straight into what they believe will be their exciting adult lives. The magic of Henderson's debut lies in the way she so completely captures the experience of coming-of-age in the turbulent and exciting era that was the 1980s.--Huntley, Kristin. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The ambition of "Ten Thousand Saints," Eleanor Henderson's debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus. She is never ironic or underwhelmed; her preferred mode is fierce, devoted and elegiac. The book follows a group of friends and lovers, parents and children, from 1987 until 2006, winding its way not only through Vermont and New York's East Village, but also through the straight-edge music scene and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The novel begins on a high school football field in New England and ends 20 years later at one of the last shows at CBGB, just before it closes. If your own life intersected any of these places in any of these years, then you know how to fill in that sentence; and if you were too old or too young to be deeply engaged by that particular stretch of time, you will still recognize what it is to be part of a larger cultural heartbeat during a moment in history when your own heart is beating so fast, so recklessly and so loudly. It is difficult to convey the passionate quality of a scene - the punk scene, the hip-hop scene, the Factory scene, the Viennese Secession and so on; one can summon up the physical details, but the emotional investment, like mercury, often slips away. One ends up shaking one's head, saying, "You had to be there, I guess." By delving as deeply into the lives of her characters as she does, tracing their long relationships not only to one another but also to various substances, Henderson manages to catch something of the bloody, felt intersection of lives and cult bands, of overindulgence and monastic refusal, of the dark, apocalyptic quality of the '80s. She gets extremes, and people who gravitate toward them. If there is sometimes, perhaps, a little too much here, if the volume gets a little high, it's understandable: the writer seems to want to make sure that we can hear the sound she presumably hears so clearly herself. The knot of intimacy at the center of "Ten Thousand Saints" is the friendship between Teddy McNicholas and Jude Keffy-Horn. Teenagers when the book begins, they specialize in petty theft, hanging out and skipping school. They not only smoke pot, they also huff turpentine and, later, Freon from an office building's air-conditioner. They are somewhat worse than bad - they are, one can already see, on their way down to tiny, numb lives in the middle of nowhere. Their parents are similarly ill equipped to deal with life, being themselves old-school stoners who do as little as possible to get by. And then something happens, something unexpected and definitive, that propels Jude out of Vermont and down to New York to live with his father, Les, an East Village pot dealer and a pretty nice guy whose idea of paternal authority is to mandate that his kid can smoke only weed grown by Les. Since Jude, who is adopted, is probably already suffering from the lifelong effects of fetal alcohol syndrome, one does tend to wonder if Les has the sense God gave a piece of lint, but whatever: Henderson is less interested in scolding these spacey parents than in showing what might produce a fervent commitment to a world as rigorous and rule-governed as the straight-edge music scene. Teddy's older brother, Johnny, is a guru in that scene, and he quickly becomes Jude's guru as well, initiating him into a life of no drugs, no sex, no meat, no worldly possessions, and a fanatic devotion to concerts that feature a lot of body-slamming among "shirtless New York hardcore boys" and music played very, very, very loud. (The homoerotic core of hardcore is just one of the fascinating cultural threads Henderson unwinds here.) Johnny, a tattoo artist, is muscular, highly tattooed himself and prone to thoughts like, "A true sannyasi neither hates nor desires." Troubled, lonely, dyslexic, drop-out Jude falls hard for his routine. Among many other things, Henderson is exploring what might cause a conversion experience, and what that conversion might do to a raggedy, overwhelmed, many-seamed, modern family. The difference between the stoned parents and the turpentine-huffing kids who go clean isn't, actually, one of sober versus altered states; it has more to do with those who seek intensity and those who shield themselves from it. Les, who likes to kick back with a full bong and the Times crossword puzzle, can't understand what sends his son slamming between extremes. Of the new, straight-edge Jude, he thinks, "Surely this turbulent little reverend with the military haircut was not Les's flesh and blood." (Which Jude isn't, literally, but the emotion is the same.) YET if straight-edge demands an almost spartan renunciation from its followers, it still can't stand in the way of love, and the antidote to Jude's conversion turns out to be the depth of feeling that develops between him and a one-time fling of Teddy's, Eliza, who finds herself pregnant at 15. Eventually, the characters form a new, makeshift family around this pregnancy, realigning their respective choices and ideas about who they are. It is, inescapably, an old-fashioned narrative solution to the conflicts and rough edges Henderson is exploring: the family can keep the devil of soul-hunger at bay. Well, maybe. I am less convinced by this conversion than by the others, which more intuitively trade one sort of intensity for another. The novel also stumbles in places with its overintense descriptions of everything in sight - the interior design of a Japanese restaurant, the provenance of a Dodge A100 van, the history of the Champlain Recreation Center going back to the French and Indian War - and with a suspiciously 11th-hour rescue by a previously little-seen character. When the entire company moved back to Vermont to start a band, I got a little road-weary. The dial might go to 11, but keeping it there for 400 pages can be tough on even the most sympathetic reader. But if these are flaws, they are the flaws of not knowing quite when to stop, of never wanting to stop, of being able to play all night, of, no, wait, you just have to hear this one. As flaws go, I'll take them. These kids embrace a life of no drugs, no sex, no meat and a devotion to concerts with lots of body-slamming. Stacey D'Erasmo's most recent novel is "The Sky Below."
School Library Journal Review
It begins with the drug-fueled last day in the life of 15-year-old Teddy McNicholas, and spirals from there into the lives of those who were closest to him. Henderson's depiction of late-1980s New York is impressive-from the Straight Edge scene to the gay community's grappling with HIV. (June) (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
Stroll down Saint Mark's Place in New York City today - past the glossy new high-rises and the twentysomethings dressed in hip high-end fashion label Band of Outsiders - and you might find it hard to remember the period in the twilight of the Reagan years when it was the gritty centre of hardcore punk, the faster, heavier music that succeeded punk rock, and when crack vials and needles littered the streets. This vanished New York is the subject of Eleanor Henderson's first novel. It's so far away it almost seems like a dream. That might be the subtext of the lovely exchange that opens the book: "'Is it dreamed?' Jude asked Teddy. 'Or dreamt?' Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy's life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas." This lyrical, understated passage shows off Henderson's considerable talents. Teddy and Jude are 16-year-old best friends growing up in smalltown Lintonburg, VT (a fictionalisation of Burlington). They smoke a lot of pot, skip school, invent asinine nicknames for local spots ("Pizza Slut" and "Haagen-Douche") and huff turpentine. They're into the Misfits and Black Flag and Metallica. The first 50 pages of Ten Thousand Saints, which chronicle a single night, offer as tender and fierce a portrait of them as one could ask for. The night in question is a meandering New Year's Eve spent on the margins, during which Teddy has sex for the first time - with Eliza, the daughter of Jude's father's girlfriend - just hours before his untimely death. The book traces the effects of Teddy's death on a handful of intertwined people, skittering from Lintonburg to New York and back again over the course of 1988. The book's territory - the mid-80s hardcore and straight-edge scene in which scores of punk-rock loving kids renounced drugs, drink, eating animals, and promiscuous sex, in reaction to the perceived excesses of the time, is as central as any character. In the aftermath of Teddy's death, Jude falls into a depression that leads his mother to ship him off to her former husband Les, who abandoned the family and moved to New York City when Jude was nine. Adrift in the East Village, Jude takes up with Johnny, Teddy's older half-brother, who's become a straight edge Hare Krishna, and gives up drugs. They start a band and form an impromptu family with the pregnant Eliza, protecting Teddy's unborn child from her mother, who wants Eliza to abort it. Confused? You're meant to be. Ten Thousand Saints portrays the chaos of the post-nuclear family in the hands of former hippies, but Henderson never judges her characters, and rarely sentimentalises them. At its best, this high-octane ensemble novel evocatively charts the way teenagers' lives interconnect. Henderson has hit on a fabulous subject, taking in all the crucial cultural touchstones: CBGB's Sunday hardcore "matinees", the advent of Aids, the anarchist group Missing Foundation, the ties between the straight edge movement and Hare Krishnas. She is first-rate on the adolescent period when you leave your family behind but have no prospect as yet of a new one, and friends assume the importance your parents once had. At the same time, the novel's events feel as though they take place at the far end of a telescope, rather than right outside our window. Too much of the writing feels studied, and the result is more like a bus tour through the East Village than a dispatch from the streets. After its powerful opening section, the book becomes choppy and overly plotted, and there's curiously little writing about punk rock itself. Still, Ten Thousand Saints has an intuitive grasp of the hungering souls of adolescents, and Henderson cannily illuminates the contradictions at the core of straight edge - the way violence shadows its obsession with purification, the fact that so many of its adherents were trading drugs or drink for just another peer-driven identity. This isn't, finally, so much a book about music or New York as about the possibilities that are passed by, both as a culture and as individuals. It's too bad, then, that Henderson gets tangled up in her plot and loses sight of her best qualities. Meghan O'Rourke's The Long Goodbye is published by Virago. To order Ten Thousand Saints for pounds 10.39 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop - Meghan O'Rourke That might be the subtext of the lovely exchange that opens the book: "'Is it dreamed?' Jude asked Teddy. 'Or dreamt?' Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy's life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas." This lyrical, understated passage shows off [Eleanor Henderson]'s considerable talents. Teddy and Jude are 16-year-old best friends growing up in smalltown Lintonburg, VT (a fictionalisation of Burlington). They smoke a lot of pot, skip school, invent asinine nicknames for local spots ("Pizza Slut" and "Haagen-Douche") and huff turpentine. They're into the Misfits and Black Flag and Metallica. The first 50 pages of Ten Thousand Saints, which chronicle a single night, offer as tender and fierce a portrait of them as one could ask for. - Meghan O'Rourke.
Kirkus Review
Screwed-up parents beget screwed-up kids. So it's no surprise that an ill-omened teen pregnancy is the centerpiece of this bold debut, a heady witches' brew.Teddy and Jude, best friends in their mid-teens, have big problems. Jude was adopted at birth, possibly suffering from fetal-alcohol effects. His adoptive parents, Les and Harriet, are feckless potheads, Les growing pot, Harriet making drug paraphernalia. When Jude turns nine, Harriet evicts Les for cheating on her; Jude hasn't seen him since. As for Teddy, his Indian father is supposedly dead; his white mother, a sloppy drunk, has just split. The boys skateboard through their Vermont town, getting high and shoplifting at will. On this last day of 1987, they have a date with Eliza, a total stranger but the daughter of Les' girlfriend. At 15, she's already a cokehead and sexually promiscuous. They gatecrash a party. Eliza gives Teddy cocaine before they have sex in a bathroom and she returns to New York. Back out in the cold, Jude's idea that they inhale Freon is a step too far; he almost dies and Teddy does die, but he will haunt the novel, for he has made Eliza pregnant. All this could be depressing, but it's not, thanks to the barbed language and fast pacing. And Henderson's just getting started. Les shows up to remove Jude to Alphabet City, the ravaged Manhattan neighborhood where he lives. A near neighbor is Teddy's 18-year-old half brother Johnny, whose role becomes increasingly prominent. Johnny is a tattoo artist and musician, as well as a straight-edge hardcore punk (no booze, no drugs). Although a closeted gay, he chivalrously offers to marry Eliza and claim paternity to thwart Eliza's mother, who's pushing for adoption. This is where Henderson loses the thread, wobbling uncertainly between Jude, Johnny and Eliza while doing double duty as a counterculture guide to the straight-edge scene. Context overwhelms characters, the unwieldy cast now including Johnny's AIDS-stricken lover and Teddy's Indian father.Henderson displays a powerful moral imagination; all that's missing is discipline.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
By the end of the fourth sentence of this debut novel, the reader knows that on December 31, 1987, 15-year-old Teddy will be dead. The Vermont teen, best friend to Jude, 16, dies of a drug overdose that nearly kills Jude as well-but not before Teddy's one glorious sexual encounter impregnates worldly wise Eliza, daughter of Jude's father's New York City girlfriend. The three teens, the children of mothers and fathers who are all over the parenting map (former and current potheads; an alcoholic; one deprived of contact by his ex; a rich, powerful, and controlling Manhattanite; and a sensible Earth-Mother glassblower), break your heart with their awkward, angry, irresponsible stumbling. And yet Jude, shaken by Teddy's death, and Eliza, determined to give birth to her baby, move in unexpected directions, led by Teddy's half-brother Johnny, a tattoo artist and musician associated with a cutting-edge group called straight edge that worships punk while demonizing drugs. Johnny must battle his own demons while taking on Jude's and Eliza's. VERDICT Henderson's powerful, surprising look at lost teens trying to course-correct with the violence-tinged straight-edge culture captivates via its authentic reassurance that adolescence is an often reckless ride to adulthood. [See Prepub Alert, 11/29/10.]-Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.